


where treetops glisten, and children listen

by haveloved



Category: Home Fires (UK TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 09:55:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8974975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haveloved/pseuds/haveloved
Summary: For Miriam, a snowstorm brings back memories of David’s childhood—particularly the day an asthma attack brought on by the cold nearly killed him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Home Fires Winter Advent Challenge organized by Lina over at fyhomefires! My Day One prompt was Miriam + snow.
> 
> Most of my advent challenge fics will be based around bits from the press packs I’ve spent quite a bit of time reading over the past couple months of writing for this show. It’s mentioned in Mim’s summary there that David had a near fatal asthma attack when he was a baby, which my brain decided to warp into him being at least seven or eight, but oh well! :) This takes place in the only December we have in canon, between 1x03 and 1x04, before David has snuck off to enlist.

Snow, freshly fallen, had always made her feel like a child again. There had been something magical about it—no footprints, no tracks from the farm equipment or the sheep, no muck or grass in sight…

It was cold sitting by the window, but she wouldn’t trade the view for a seat by the fire. The sight of the snow brought her peace, a hard thing to find in a world at war.

After hours of her gaze darting between her knitting to the snow and back again, Mim found her eyes straying to the mantel, to her favorite picture. Every time a visitor grinned at it, asked when it was taken, David could never remember how old he’d been. She supposed it was a mother’s lot to remember the minutiae.

She could remember being frustrated as a child by her mother’s insistence on knitting ridiculously bulky jumpers. When wet, they felt like they weighed a tonne, but really, she’d had to concede they were warm. She’d found herself smiling the first time she opened a package from her mother to find a jumper of exactly that ilk for David, just in time for the first snowstorm of the year to hit Great Paxford.

David hadn’t shared her frustration with the bulky material—rather, he’d been thrilled Gran had remembered the royal blue he considered his favorite color, and if the jumper’s weight had constricted his movement at all, he hadn’t said a word about it. Indeed, he’d spent hours outside proudly building the snowman she’d photographed him with.

It was Bryn who’d noticed—Bryn, who hated cold and damp because it reminded him of the trenches, but who had decided to soldier on, so to speak, and play with his son. It was Bryn who noticed David seemed too out of breath from the mild exertions of assembling the snowman, when he’d been the one doing most of the rolling and heavy lifting. It was Bryn who’d seen men suffocate and die in the trenches, who’d yelled for her to come outside quickly, who’d run through the icy streets to the Campbells’ surgery with David in his arms, her following after in little more than a dressing gown over her nightdress.

She wished, quite often, that the happier memories of that day—the first sight of David in that too-big jumper, the sound of him and Bryn laughing as they built the snowman, David cajoling her for a scarf to put on the snowman and Bryn kissing her cheek to try and finally convince her to give one up—were as clear as what had come after. But when it came down to it, of course she remembered those dreadful minutes in the surgery more clearly—Erica’s arm around her shoulders as she’d sobbed, both to comfort her and to keep her out of the room so her panicking and fear wouldn’t distract Will from his ministrations. She remembered Will’s measured tone as he’d explained calmly enough that David had suffered a severe asthma attack, brought on and exacerbated by the cold air, though a single look at his slightly trembling hands had betrayed how unnerved he’d been to see a boy his own daughters’ age struggling so much to breathe.

She felt, sometimes, as though she were the only one to remember it all, to have that day haunt her dreams, or, rather, her nightmares. Wasn’t she, if she thought about it? Surely, if Bryn and David remembered it the way she did, they would neither of them be so eager for him to go off to the bloody front.

The silence made it easy enough to hear David’s bike coming up the icy street and into the front yard. She thought she saw him waving as he noticed her at the window. After he stowed his bike in the back shed, he made his way into the house, brushing snow from the shoulders of his coat as he pulled it off and hung it.

“I take it there was no show?” she asked, smiling softly, and he sighed and shook his head.

“After all that. Owner of the cinema couldn’t be bothered to show up in this weather, when all his patrons did.”

“I’m sure there’s some other place to run into Laura Campbell,” she said, teasing softly, and she thought the redness of David’s cheeks wasn’t from how close he’d come to the fire.

“Dad asleep?”

“Only for the last hour. Thought I’d wait up.” She held up her knitting—there wasn’t much she’d gotten from her mother but that.

“You didn’t have to, Mum; I’m—”

“—sixteen, I know, but it won’t stop me.” Didn’t he know, from their arguments the past few months?

“Fair enough. … Glad you did, though.”

He rose, and the shadow he cast on the floor reminded her how tall he’d gotten. He bent to kiss her forehead and retreat to his room, same as any growing boy, and for a moment as she stood her gaze drifted out the window again. The snow would melt, her memories wouldn’t fade, and she’d always look after David. There were few things truer than those.


End file.
